News item: 8 Ways CIOs Sabotage Their Own Influence and How to Avoid Them

In my experience, even the most brilliant CIOs can lose their voice at the executive table if they fall into certain traps. This CIO article uncovers eight common behaviors that erode a CIO’s influence — and offers a roadmap to stay indispensable in your organization.

Strong influence at the C-level takes years to build — and can vanish in moments. Below are eight pitfalls CIOs often walk into, and how to steer clear.

• Misplaced or disconnected goals
  If your focus is only on platforms, modules, or vendors — without tying them to growth, risk, or resilience — you risk being seen as a “systems keeper” instead of a strategic leader. With diminishing influence, you’ll find yourself invited late to decisions or sidelined in scoping major projects.


• Poor leadership stance
  When CIOs respond to business direction rather than helping shape it, their role becomes supportive, not strategic. Falling in love with technological potential instead of business value is another pitfall — you may lose trust from other C-level peers.


• Chronic negativity
  When your default position is “No, that won’t work,” you become a bottleneck. In modern organizations where business leaders already have tech knowledge, such negativity pushes them to bypass you and find alternate routes.


• Breaking trust
  Deflecting responsibility, criticizing teams publicly, or failing to defend your people in crises erodes credibility. Once trust is broken, it’s hard to rebuild — and you may find yourself excluded from future planning or strategic roles.


• Losing opportunities and responsibilities
  If you allow jobs like AI strategy, data leadership, or customer experience to slip to roles like CTO, CDO, or Chief Digital Officer, your domain shrinks. Without a unified leadership role across technology, your influence becomes inward-facing.


• Failing to translate tech into business value
  If your proposals don’t clearly articulate value — and are disconnected from business objectives — you become seen as a cost center. Departments may bypass you, adopting their own tech (shadow IT) instead.


• Viewing leadership merely as service delivery
  If your IT strategy is centered on service metrics like ticket resolution or uptime, you risk being boxed in as an IT vendor instead of a strategic enabler. That shift reduces your role from visionary to caretaker.


• Operating in isolation
  When you craft tech strategy detached from broader business reality, your decisions may not align with value chains, competitive dynamics, or customer journeys. To stay relevant, you must bridge the business and technical worlds — positioning yourself first as a strategist, second as a technologist.

Influence at the executive level is fragile — and many CIOs unknowingly do the work to erode it. By avoiding these eight traps and continuously aligning technology with strategy, you can preserve a seat at the table and ensure technology drives, rather than lags, your organization’s ambitions.

Do you want help assessing whether your leadership approach is inadvertently undermining your influence? I can assist in auditing your goals, communication styles, alignment frameworks and stakeholder relationships — to sharpen your role as a strategic, trusted CIO.


(CIO – 8 Ways CIOs Undermine Their Enterprise Influence, 2025-09-24)

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